Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. He worked in journalism for over a decade, and won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2007. His bestselling novel, My Friend Sancho, was published in 2009. He is best known for his blog, India Uncut. These days, he makes his living playing poker as he works on his second novel.

My Friend Sancho

My first book, My Friend Sancho, was published in May 2009, and went on to become the biggest selling debut novel released that year in India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and had earlier been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.

This is the 34th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover. I discovered poker as…

09 July, 2014

Pop the Question

This is the 14th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

What is the difference between a good poker player and a bad one? I’ll take a shot at an answer: good players pose tough questions to their opponents. They bet, raise, 3-bet, float, call down, check-shove, use every weapon in the poker arsenal to take their opponents out of their comfort zones and induce errors. Bad players, on the other hand, fail to ask tough questions even of themselves.

As we play hundreds and thousands and millions of hands, we tend to develop certain standard ways of dealing with different situations. The immediate result of an action does not reflect the correctness of the play, so it is easy to develop bad habits, and to reflexively slip into flawed patterns of playing hands. Ideally, whenever a player is about to take any action at a poker table, he should ask himself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ This sounds banal and obvious – but you’d be amazed at how often players are not sure why they’re betting in a particular spot.

A poker book I recommend to beginners, Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, deals with this in its first chapter. (Like Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Don DeLillo’s Underworld, the first chapter alone is worth the price of the book.) It is called ‘The Reasons for Betting’, and makes the point that many of the justifications people give for betting are invalid and flawed. ‘I’m betting because I think I have the best hand’ or ‘I’m raising for information’ are terrible reasons to throw chips in the middle.

Consider this hand from a game I was at yesterday. My friend, on the button, called an early-position raise with KQo. The flop came KT3r. The original raiser bet, and my friend announced a raise. His opponent shoved, and my friend had to fold. I asked him why he raised. ‘For information,’ he replied. ‘To find out where I was at.’

This is terrible thinking. There are two primary reasons to bet or raise: for value, or as a bluff. To get a worse hand to call, or a better hand to fold. In this case, my friend’s raise made sure that only better hands in his opponent’s range continued, and worse hands folded. Put simply, he inflated the pot against hands that beat him, and lost the chance to pick up value from worse hands on later streets. In that spot, he should just have called. Anything else – folding or raising – is a losing play.

Every single time you put money in the pot, you should ask yourself why you are doing so. What impact does it have on your opponent’s range? Does a bet from you serve the purpose of being either a bluff or a value-bet? (You could also ‘merge’, or put in a bet that profitably aims to both get better hands to fold and worse hands to call. But this is advanced, and the wannabe Tom Dwans around me who use that term are generally misapplying it to thin-value bets.) Seidman also advances a third reason for betting, the ‘capitalisation of dead money’, which he defines as ‘making the opponent fold, whether his hand is better or worse, and collecting the money in the pot.’ But he warns that this is ‘rarely a primary reason for betting’, and I’d advise beginners to stick to betting just for two reasons: for value, or as a bluff. Not for information, or protection, or an assertion of how macho you are.

In life, as in poker, we often fail to ask ourselves basic questions. We sleepwalk through large chunks of our lives, doing the expected things, studying phalana in college, doing dhimkana job, getting married, having kids, following the script. We get stuck in routines, imprisoned by inertia. We rarely ask ‘Why?’ And when we fail to do so, then, as in poker, we lose a little something.

This character’s creator described him as “insufferable”, and called him a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. On August 6 1975, the New York Times carried his obituary, the only time it has thus honoured a fictional character. Who?